


Jean la Bête

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Beauty and the Beast Elements, Community: watsons_woes, M/M, Retirement, Sherlock Holmes's Retirement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:00:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25142785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: Every night, Belle, I will ask you one question.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 31
Kudos: 108
Collections: Watson's Woes JWP Collection: 2020





	Jean la Bête

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2020 July Watson's Woes Promptfest prompt #7, **TICKY BOXES FOR THE WIN!!!:** You voted for it - you got it! Let your work today include a check box, tally mark, or other mark that records a preference. .

**Marry Me? YES [ ] NO [ ]**

I held the note I'd pulled from under my wineglass out to John as he seated himself, and gave him my best glare – the one that has caused three spontaneous confessions from hardened felons. "John, you are fully cognizant of current British and Church of England laws."

Unfortunately, my companion was immune to said glare. "Then mark it as you will," John said, tucking his napkin under his chin.

Shaking my head, I set the note down unmarked and attended to my roast.

***

The next evening no notes sullied our dinner table. However, a twin of the first note was in my violin case.

**Marry Me? YES [ ] NO [ ]**

I looked over at my lifelong friend who seemed wholly engrossed in the model of a three-masted sailing ship he was currently assembling. "Shall I take you to Westminster Cathedral and demand the vicar honour our unity as it deserves? We would both perish in prison before our sentences were complete, given our current age and infirmities."

"It's a simple query, Sherlock." John didn't even look up from the jib he was rigging. "Two possible answers."

I tossed the note into the fire and played Wagner all evening.

***

**Marry Me? YES [ ] NO [ ]**

God damn the man.

I yanked the note from my toothbrush holder and limped back into the master bedroom where my partner undressed for his bath. "Are you a 64-year old war hero twice over and the best biographer in England since James Boswell's death, or are you a timid 10-year-old boy making eyes at the girl next door?"

"That's not the selection offered in the note." John exhaled and began to unbutton his flies. I left him to his bath; my apiology books needed reorganising.

***

I'd established the pattern as it was absurdly simple. John never left a note at any time during the morning. No note of any sort with my swimsuit when I arose before my life mate for a morning dip. No note at luncheon. None among the tea things. No note near the beehives, where I worked by day; none around the motorcar, where John tinkered with the thing during that same time.

But let me go to the sideboard for an evening brandy and there was that never-changing four-word note nestled between the decanters. Or woven through the tines of my salad fork. Or perched at the kitchen window above the dinner dishes. Or waiting for me wherever my evening pursuits took me.

I never marked a box. I stopped remonstrating with John ("By now we'd be a common-law marriage if this country's laws were more compassionate toward homosexuals"; "You are NOT a wife! Nor am I!"; "Will you ever tire of sending me these pointless, ridiculous notes?"), which meant no more of my longtime comrade's replies ("You've only to check a box"; "I'm not asking about wives"; "You may deduce the answer to that yourself").

The notes were crumpled, tossed in the waste-paper basket, burned in the fire, torn to confetti, and once (I'd been in a temper all day from difficulties with one of my brood-boxes) eaten defiantly in front of the author. Each time the response was the same; my dearest friend only nodded and returned his attention to whatever he'd been doing.

The whole thing was absurd. If it was a game, I could not deduce the purpose. It was very close to a cruel jab, repeatedly reminding me that we _could not_ wed, not under any current law nor any current church in any country. My desire to put my ring on his finger was sublimated into a gold handcuff bracelet, easily hidden under a shirt-cuff; his, a watch-fob of agate and lapis that instantly replaced a worn sovereign with a long-dead Queen upon it. We had shared rooms for nearly 40 years, outlasting many wedded couples and three monarchs. But marriage was impossible. There was no point to such a note.

In no pleasant mood, I opened my desk drawer to write to Mycroft, accepting his offer.

**Marry Me? YES [ ] NO [ ]**

I stalked into John's office. The rhythmic clacking of his typewriter ceased and he looked up.

"Next week I am going to London for three days. I have business to transact. Should you need to contact me with some useful message, I will be staying with Mycroft."

His eyebrows rose. Normally we go together, if rare occasions (these days, far too many funerals of old friends) drew us back to the city.

"I'm quite sure you'll find three new locales for these infernal notes. I shall do my best to deduce their future sites while I'm gone."

A long pause. "Very well. Give your brother my best." John turned to face his work again as I left.

But the clacking sound did not resume for a half-hour.

***

This trip was yet more proof of the injustice of our circumstances. I needed to redraw several parts of my will to ensure beyond all doubt that John Watson was to be the recipient of the majority of my estate. Such things were far easier and less contested for married couples. The only thing that made this solo trip bearable was that I was not in town to bury yet another policeman or Irregular.

At dinner the first night I showed Mycroft a few of the notes. (There was no point in ever dissembling about our natures to my intellectual superior.) "Surely he knows how futile this is. Is he, is he ill?" That was the closest I could bring myself to whisper a thought about John's mental state.

"From your descriptions, Sherlock, John Watson does not have any symptoms of encroaching senile dementia. These are rather amusing."

I glared at my vast sibling. "I don't find it funny."

"That is because you are approaching this as a matter of the head – something to solve. From that perspective, this cannot be solved for the reasons we both know." Mycroft heaved a mighty sigh. "In matters beyond the mind, I am more lost than you."

I glared at my cutlet, unadorned with any ridiculous schoolboy notes. "He knows I love him. I may have once opined that I was very fond of the soil upon which he trod. We have fought and bled and celebrated for nearly twice as long as Victoria and Albert were wed. Yet all our legal documents list us as 'Single.' I hate the lie it tells. But the law is our enemy in this matter, without even a name for what we are together." I exhaled, almost shuddering; but I felt much better, as if I'd vomited up the noxious cause of a stomach-ache. "That's why they've bothered me."

Mycroft nodded. "Once you have edited your codicils and dotted every i, I think this annoyance will subside. You might even decide to be entertained by these schoolboy notes of his."

"We're grown men for God's sake," I grumbled as my parting shot.

My strange older sibling smiled. "What's the point of being grown up if you can't act childish?"

The next day I was nearly done with my business when my solicitor's 'phone rang; it was Mycroft, looking for me. Our Sussex neighbour Harold had called to say he was driving John to the hospital with heart pains.

Tamping down fear and panic, I demanded that Mr. Grant and I conclude this business _now_ , within the next half-hour, if he valued my continuing patronage. He was stunned, but my glare works very well on solicitors; it was done.

I now know how John felt when he broke land-sea records in getting to Lyons after the Maupertuis business, for I performed a miniature re-enactment of that feat, travelling from London to Sussex. I returned to the cottage, fully prepared to storm a hospital room.

But when I opened the front door, John was in the parlour in his usual chair. He looked up and smiled in apology. "They sent me home with nitroglycerin tablets. The pain was terrible, but it wasn't a heart attack, Sherlock. Don't take on so. I feel much better."

"You almost gave _me_ one, you selfish bastard!" I snarled. "Take your goddamn notes and have done with them!"

And I flung the handful of retained four-word slips at him, scattering over and on and around him, all the same:

**Marry Me? YES [ XXXXX ] NO [ ]**

And my husband smiled at me.


End file.
